Tuesday Oct 01, 2013

With new computing technologies to transform business, is your underlying directory infrastructure ready to support mobile, cloud and social networking? How can I simplify my directory architecture but deliver high scalability, availability and performance? How to leverage directory to easily make your applications location aware and social relationship aware? How do I migrate existing directories to OUD? How to optimize OUD performance on T5/ T4 hardware? This was one of many of highly attended conference sessions at this year's Oracle OpenWorld 2013. If you missed this, or would like a second opportunity to see this presentation in slide form, join us by checking out "Next Generation Optimized Directory" today.

Monday Sep 30, 2013

Access governance has become more complex
as regulations have increased and audit controls now span multiple
applications. Audit requirements for single applications are simple by
comparison to multiple system requirements. As the number of applications increase,
streamlining becomes more important. In this session, David Cusick, Group
Information Security Director at Zurich Insurance, shares his learning
experiences from streamlining access governance. Join David for an encore presentation of this webcast, hosted by ISACA.

Friday Sep 27, 2013

It is vital that hospitals effectively manage how users are able to access and use information. Effective identity management (IdM) dramatically improves organizational efficiency, reduces the health care providers IT footprint and cost, supports regulatory compliance, improves security, and enables access to emerging technologies such as mobility and patient portals. CloudIdentity provides health care specific identity management capabilities based on Oracle technology and delivered securely via the cloud, allowing hospitals to quickly realize the many benefits of IdM.

John Houston Vice President of Privacy and Information Security, Associate Counsel at UPMC & President of CloudConnect Health IT presents this informative webinar, as he discusses how IdM allows health care organizations to securely unlock the potential of health care IT. Join us for this encore presentation with John Houston!

Monday Sep 23, 2013

Is your organization emphasizing an approach of developing privacy and security within every aspect of your application architecture? Are you a software developer struggling to understand how to merge privacy and security into your code? Are you a systems integrator working to keep up with the latest regulatory, compliance and privacy needs and how to merge this into your customers? Or are you a corporate CISO/CIO wanting to understand how your organization should be developing the strongest Privacy and Security processes?

In an earlier paper with Oracle, we discussed the
convergence of paradigms between the approach to privacy I have long
championed called Privacy by Design, and a similar approach to security
called ‘Security by Design.’ The current and future challenges to
security and privacy oblige us to revisit this convergence and delve
deeper. As privacy and security professionals, we must come together and
develop a proactive approach to security – one that is indeed “by
design.” To this end, I am delighted to be partnering with Mark Dixon,
Enterprise Architect, Information Security, at Oracle Corporation, on
this joint paper.

This paper has two key objectives:

Define a set of foundational “Security by Design” principles that
are modelled upon and support the 7 foundational principles of Privacy
by Design.

Illustrate an enterprise-level process for defining and governing
the strategic journey of Security by Design through an enterprise
architecture approach.

To achieve these objectives, the paper includes the following major sections:

Foundational Principles of Privacy by Design

Foundational Principles of Security by Design

The Enterprise Security Journey

Conclusion

This is a great opportunity to hear some of the best practices being recommended by both Oracle, and leading government agencies to understand how Privacy and Security should be factored in, across the board.

Click on the link, to get access to the Privacy by Design page which is hosting not only the whitepaper, but a great video with Ann Cavoukian, outlining some of what you will learn in this paper. We hope this paper will assist developers, integrators and enterprises to deliver stronger security and better privacy, for all of their stakeholders – a win/win proposition.

Tuesday Sep 17, 2013

Why do you have so many virtual identities? Most individuals currently have an internet mail identity, several social networking identities, and corporate virtual identities...and don’t really want more identities to manage.

Online communication has been transformed by the advent of effective mobile computing, and more organizations are providing employee and customer access to services via mobile devices.

Securely Enabling Mobile Access for Business Transformation [CON8896] will review the security and usability concerns that are further compounded by bring your own device (BYOD) policies. In addition to speakers from Oracle, this session will also include presenters Arup Thomas (Verizon Wireless) and Abdullah Togay (Ministry of National Education).

Thursday Sep 12, 2013

Enterprises deploy Information Technology (IT) applications in various ways today. They may use on-premise physical servers, virtualization, private clouds, public clouds, or a combination thereof. In all cases, the main goals include improving the ease of application deployment, increasing system performance, providing security across the enterprise, and ensuring contained costs.

This white paper presents the business benefits of leveraging Oracle’s engineered systems for deploying and running Oracle Identity Management. Click to read

Monday Sep 09, 2013

It is vital that hospitals effectively manage how users are able to access and use information. Effective identity management (IdM) dramatically improves organizational efficiency, reduces the health care providers IT footprint and cost, supports regulatory compliance, improves security, and enables access to emerging technologies such as mobility and patient portals. CloudIdentity provides health care specific identity management capabilities based on Oracle technology and delivered securely via the cloud, allowing hospitals to quickly realize the many benefits of IdM.

Join John Houston Vice President of Privacy and Information Security, Associate Counsel at UPMC & President of CloudConnect Health IT for this informative webinar series, as he discusses how IdM allows health care organizations to securely unlock the potential of health care IT. REGISTER

The use of IdM allows a health care provider to enforce appropriate access to its health care applications. IdM is also critical to improving efficiency and enabling support for new technologieslike mobility. Attendees will learn how this unique blend of market leading technology and health care identity management expertise will allow your organization to affordably access the many benefits of idM. To join part 1 of this 3 part series, click below to REGISTER:

Friday Aug 23, 2013

As
organized cyber-attacks become sophisticated and targeted, organizations,
particularly those in the financial and health sectors, have come under strict
regulations. The growing security risks
from internal and external sources have brought focus on both preventive and
detective controls working together to protect data. In this edition of the
Oracle IAM blog series, we will take a look at how an organization can leverage
Oracle’s Identity and Access Management technologies in conjunction with
Oracle’s database security offerings.

Challenge

Traditionally,
encryption has been considered as the required approach to protect information.
However, complex information systems have led to implementation of a
defense-in-depth approach to database security that includes stronger
preventive and detective controls. In addition to encryption, preventive
measures should also include restricting access to data within the
organization. Compliance requirements on the other hand, have driven adoption
of detective controls such as database activity monitoring and auditing.
Detective controls complement preventive controls by filtering attempts to
connect to the information system, generating activity reports, and help
investigations of potential breaches.

A
common concern identified in several organizations is the lack of insight about
the access users have. This usually stems from multiple points to manually
create users and ad-hoc processes, such as a phone call, to grant access to
applications. By relying on incoherent manual processes to provide, monitor and
audit user access, the organization risks drastic implications on the privacy
and integrity of their information. Deloitte approaches this problem by
leveraging solutions like Oracle’s IAM stack to pro-actively restrict database
access by defining user profiles and centrally managing user life cycle. This,
coupled with preventive and detective controls, can offer a holistic approach
to securing information.

Separation of Duties

Separation
of duties is an important component to managing user access because it
separates the responsibility of sensitive tasks into multiple people, so that
no one person has all power. Oracle Database Vault, an add-on to Oracle
database, protects against insider threats by restricting read/write access to
sensitive data. For example, an administrator can be allowed to increase or
decrease the size of a table, but given the role, they will be denied
read/write access to the contents of the table. By securing access to the data
based on multi-factor policies such as application, IP address, and other
pre-determined factors, organizations have granular control over what, when,
where, and how users can access sensitive data.

Deloitte’s
strategy lets the client manage access to its data layer by separating approach
vectors, such as internal or external clients, or type of access such as web
and mobile applications. Oracle Access Manager helps to control user’s access
to web applications, and Oracle Entitlement Server allows administrators to
control what a user can see within an application.

Preventive Controls

The
first step in this direction is to have a least-privilege approach to endeavor
to provide that each user has a base profile giving them minimum access to the
database. These profiles can be configured through Oracle Identity Manager
(OIM). If a user’s business function requires elevated access, it can be
requested. Requests access can be made through a central portal and provisioned
automatically through OIM. The requirement for approvals adds a layer of
control for the client over what a user can view or modify.

In
order to have granular access control, the information stored within the database
should be ranked based on sensitivity; this can be achieved by deploying Oracle
Label Security (OLS). With OLS in place, only the users with read/write access
to sensitive information will be able to interact with the data. By comparing a
user’s profile and the level assigned to the data, level based access to data
is determined. These data ranks are defined according to the organization’s
requirements with the highest level assigned to the most sensitive information.
Adding finer security controls, data is put in “compartments” that can have their
own levels. For example, the financial compartment can have the highest level
ranking.

Detective Controls

As
mentioned above, Oracle Database Vault provides security by preventing access.
There is a lot that can be done to secure information above the data level. Database
defense-in-depth also includes database activity monitoring and auditing. Oracle
Audit Vault and Database Firewall monitor database traffic to detect and block
threats. The tools help improve compliance reporting by consolidating audit
data from databases, operating systems, directories, and other sources. The
following illustration shows how the two can work together:

Logs
from the Database Firewall and other systems in the network, can be fed into the
Audit Vault. Then, custom and template-driven database activity reports can be
generated to help address compliance and regulations.

Conclusion

Deloitte
suggests organizations establish a database defense-in-depth strategy that
includes multiple layers of both preventive and detective security controls. By
logging the entire process of user account creation, granting access, changing
roles, and user account termination, the organization has a 360-degree approach
to access governance. Detective controls add valuable context for investigations
and provide a critical layer of security during a security breach incident. If network
firewalls are by-passed, or in the case of an insider threat, preventive controls
can offer a strong defense. Since these security controls are granular, they
can be effectively configured to limit employees to their day-to-day activities.
Identity and access management helps setup work flows for provisioning and defining
roles to limit access; this coupled with encryption, activity monitoring and
reporting, form a holistic defense-in-depth approach to security and compliance.

Wednesday Aug 14, 2013

In this edition of the Oracle IDM blog, we’ll look at a case study for integrating Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11g with Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) as part of an enterprise deployment and an integrated risk management strategy. We will incorporate specific use cases that leverage an integration of the two solutions to address risk and promote operational efficiency for routine tasks such as access requests and certification. In addition to the primary focus between OIM and GRC, we will also highlight how Oracle E-Business Suites (EBS) roles are defined, synchronized, and provisioned using a combination of these two solutions providing an end-to-end integrated solution of the Oracle “suite.”

Abstract

When we think about Identity Management, we often relegate it to the IT Security or Infrastructure groups where it is traditionally used to address manual security and administration functions such as creating accounts, e.g., “hire and fire” scenarios, granting additional entitlements, and providing report-outs on information access for audit purposes. As identity systems improved their ability to manage the access they provisioned, it has become clear that there was a powerful relationship between IAM and GRC initiatives to better manager enterprise compliance in an integrated, less redundant fashion.

In many organizations today, GRC initiatives are often spread across multiple infrastructure silos and managed by different business units or IT groups. Tackling the constantly evolving regulatory requirements, coupled with increased business complexity, may present an uphill battle for a compliance department within the organization. Organizations are being asked not only to understand ever-changing global regulations, but also to create appropriate strategies in addressing their GRC needs.

Knowing who has access to what is not only important from a traditional security sense, but is important to financial controls groups being able to attest that financially significant systems have minimal risk through inappropriate access. By integrating Oracle’s GRC and Identity Management platforms and the associated processes, organizations can improve user lifecycle management, continuous monitoring and automated controls enforcement to assist with sustainable risk and compliance management.

Figure 1 – Solution architecture

Solution Architecture

For a visual reference of the type of integration we are discussing, we have included an overview of how the systems can potentially interact. In Figure 1, you will notice a typical Human Resource authoritative source system feeds OIM and OIM then provisions to target resources. What’s different is the call-out to Oracle GRC to perform policy checks.

We won’t reference all of the GRC functionality available in this blog, but will focus on the segregation of duties (SoD) integration and relevant use case. [for detailed instructions on this integration, please see: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14899_01/doc.9102/e14763/segregation_duties.htm]. What’s interesting about this integration is OIM is able to leverage the information EBS and GRC already have about the roles that exist. Using OIM scheduled tasks, we are able to synchronize those roles into OIM so that there is no need to manually build them in OIM. Moreover, if the roles get end-dated in EBS, OIM reconciliation with EBS will end-date the roles and the related access for the users who have that role assigned with a goal of end-to-end compliance. Both OIM and GRC offer a web services interface for performing common transactions. More information about this can be found at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14507_01/apirefs.1112/e14133/using003.htm

Compliant User Provisioning

In our use case, we will explore how during an access request, a real-time validation can be performed against known SoD conflicts to determine if a role being requested has a conflict. Through OIM’s Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) workflow functionality, we can include an additional layer of approval if a conflict is presented. A conflict is often unavoidable and, in many cases, requires a power user from the compliance organization to step in, review the request, and document a mitigating control before accepting. In this example, we’ll show a request by a Payables Manager for an Invoice Entry EBS role.

As you can see in this process flow, there is cross-functional behavior between the OIM and GRC solutions to identify the SoD violation and apply a mitigating control if required. Ultimately, OIM manages the provisioning of the role in the end system (EBS in this example) and, therefore, will be able to continually track that entitlement.

There are three take-a-ways from this use case. With GRC and IAM integration, organizations can:

• Automate provisioning and de-provisioning of business application users, with appropriate authorization and compliance checks.
• Improve the management of enterprise accounts and efficiently produce reports such as “who has access to what.”
• Reduce the cost of compliance by removing the need for after the fact remediation.

In Conclusion

At Deloitte , we see the need to not only install and configure an IAM solution, but to work with our clients to get value out of an enterprise compliance approach. Solutions can be leveraged in their individual capacity to achieve benefits for an organization, but when organizations leverage cross-platform synergies, such as the ones that Oracle has intentionally created within their OIM and GRC solutions, the sum can become greater than the parts. An integrated approach to an organization’s IAM and GRC programs can assist in reducing costs and redundancies, and improving value to the organization.

About the Author

Kevin Urbanowicz is a Manager in Deloitte & Touche LLP’s Security & Privacy practice with eight years of experience in information technology with a focus on Identity & Access Management (IAM). He has served primarily in the Oil & Gas sector where he has helped his clients identify the business drivers and build the business case for establishing world-class IAM solutions that maximize IT efficiency and minimize security and compliance risk.

Wednesday Jul 17, 2013

Mobility, cloud-based services, healthcare reform, meaningful use, health information exchange and continued changes in privacy and security regulations has each had a profound effect on healthcare IT. To support this transformation, it is vital that an organization effectively manages how its users are able access and use information. Unfortunately, to date, many organizations have failed to develop the necessary foundational infrastructure. UPMC, through its subsidiary CloudConnect Health IT, has developed a solution called CloudIdentity, which provides healthcare specific identity management capabilities that are based on Oracle technology and delivered securely via the cloud. Join John Houston Vice President of Privacy and Information Security, Associate Counsel at UPMC & President of CloudConnect Health IT for this informative webcast, as he discusses the healthcare transformation and how healthcare organizations can securely unlock the potential of healthcare IT. Click HERE to register for this webcast, scheduled for August 20th.

Tuesday Jul 16, 2013

In our last post, we walked through a handful of practical tips and tricks to fine tune your Oracle Identity Management 11gR2 deployment. This week we look at a real life case study, focused on Oracle Directory Services, where we applied our pragmatic approach and solutions.

Case study: a multinational financial services corporation.With presence in over 200 countries, this financial services company enables consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments to use digital currency instead of cash and checks through one of the world’s most advanced processing networks, capable of handling more than 20,000 transactions per second. Like many legacy customers, the company sought Accenture’s help to strategically plan, design and upgrade to an improved version of Oracle Directory Services that provided:

The implementation comprised of approximately 50 servers located across multiple, geographically distributed data centers supporting over 100 applications and more than 250,000 users – included financial institutions, payment product processors and others doing business with this financial services company.

Environment design specification

Our environment design specification was initially developed to support legacy applications, but given a new set of business and technical requirements, we needed to modify and scale the solution to support future business services with enough capacity to grow up to 40% year over year. Key performance requirements included:

• Optimized for reads, writes and replication across data centers located across the globe
• Performs 1000 operations per second
• Supports response time of 0.05 milliseconds for single user id searches
• Supports response time of 0.15 milliseconds for single user attribute writes
• Supports 200 concurrent searches
• Supports growth rate of 10,000 objects per month over the next 5 years
• Provides real time password replication using prioritization

Modifying and scaling the solution:
Our process for modifying and scaling the solution included engaging Oracle product managers and engineers directly to validate our hardware configuration.

After we applied our performance tunings, we performed our tests in production-like environments, verified and documented our results, profiled and monitored our solution, tweaked and tuned our environment and cycled through this step-by-step process until we were satisfied that we had met all requirements. We shared the results with our Oracle peers to validate – including our testing approach which included search rates and modification rates based on 100 users and 200 users connecting concurrently – and the numbers were right on point with our expectations from the Directory Services upgrade.

How can you apply this to your environment?

Step 1:
Talk to Oracle Product Management, Development and Engineering directly,get them involved in your project as early as possible and keep them engaged throughout your project. It helps to have knowledgeable subject matter experts who can bring your implementation up to par with leading implementations. Some guidelines for checkpoints include:

Checkpoint 1: Before statement of work (SOW) is signed:
• Is the SOW clearly defined?
• Is the described product functionality feasible?
• Are measurable and achievable success criteria defined?

Checkpoint 2: Before requirements, architecture and project plan are delivered:
• Can the product fulfill the defined requirements?
• Is the architecture and solution design sound and scalable?
• Is the customer's environment ready?

Checkpoint 3: Before the design is delivered:
• Is the design technically sound?
• Can the design be implemented, migrated and supported?
• Are the test plans and approach reasonable?

Step 2:
Define specific, measurable objectives for performance tunings based on your requirements. To start with, you can use Accenture’s predefined set of key attributes for developing “good” requirements that are measurable.

• Necessary – an important capability or element of a solution which cannot be compensated for if absent
• Understandable – stated in a context which conveys the essence of what is needed
• Complete – stated in a standalone context which does not rely upon supplemental and/or assumed definitions
• Consistent – does not contradict by context or terminology nor is contradicted by other statements (e.g. is not mutually exclusive)
• Unambiguous – cannot have more than one interpretation
• Attainable – a capability which can be implemented within the constraints of available resources and technology (e.g. product, cost, schedule)
• Verifiable – can establish that the statement has been satisfied through specific measurements, test, demonstration, inspection, and/or analysis

Step 3: Determine how you plan to implement performance tunings. There is more than one way to skin a cat. In addition to the tuning configuration changes made to the environment, you also have to consider hardware sizing and configurations, middleware technologies, application and data samples used for testing and how you measure/analyze results. For example, hardware sizing guides are meant to provide you with a baseline for your deployment, but they are not exact specifications for your Oracle Identity & Access Management deployment.

The same applies for a vendor certification matrix – while Oracle’s Identity & Access Management product might be certified or supported on another vendor’s middleware or platform stack, that does not automatically imply it is the ‘optimal’ configuration for your deployment. Most organizations already have infrastructure standards (e.g. we use WebSphere Application Server for our J2EE apps), but you need to carefully consider that your Oracle Identity & Access Management deployment may be harder to tweak and tune if implemented on top of multiple vendor stacks. In fact, the more unique your configuration design is, the more challenging it will be to support and the less likely your deployment will be up to par with common practices.

Step 4: Apply your performance tunings, perform your tests, verify and document your results, profile and monitor your solution, tweak and tune it – wash, rinse and repeat. Consider the testing tools you will use to conduct your performance tests and their limitations. We used both SLAMD and HP LoadRunner for our Directory Services deployment. SLAMD had resource limitations on the number of connections and threads we could test, especially if it was not running off a dedicated server. HP LoadRunner had a limitation with testing multiple attribute updates until we applied a hot fix that the vendor eventually provided.

Also, most deployments are two- to three-tier architectures, so you have to tune the database/directory server, middleware/application server, web servers and every component in between each tier (e.g. load balancers for SSL acceleration). In fact, each tier requires its own performance tuning, pruning, cleaning, care, feeding and regular maintenance. At its core, there are several performance bottlenecks to consider:

Step 5:
Share your experiences with the Oracle Security community at large. By now, your Oracle Identity & Access Management solution should be designed to support not only your legacy applications, but also scaled to support future business services!

Stay tuned for our next post on No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM to enable new solutions and features where we highlight interesting trends in Security and Identity & Access Management.

Thursday Jul 11, 2013

NEC Australia is back with Part 2, in their two part series with key leaders from the Oracle Identity Management product team. Host Larry Samuels of NEC Australia takes us into the topic area of "Identity Governance Key Insights". This includes key information on point-in-time audits and their use as a baseline, as well as steps your organization can take to minimize your risk by better understanding the complexity of your identity enviroment. To view this video, click HERE

Wednesday Jul 10, 2013

Join NEC Australia as they host a Roundtable discussion with key members from Oracle, to discuss the Key Identity Management Trends. Host Larry Samuels of NEC Australia leads this conversation with experts in the field of Identity Management to discuss how the landscape is changing and evolving to encompass the new demands of Cloud, Mobile and regulatory compliance. With him are Amit Jasuja, Sr Vice President of Identity Management at Oracle Corporation, to help us navigate the ever changing demands of IT, and how partners like NEC are working with Oracle to meet those demands. To view Part 1 of this video, click HERE

Tuesday Jul 02, 2013

Today, technical requirements for IAM are evolving rapidly, and the bar is continuously raised for high performance IAM solutions as organizations look to roll out high volume use cases on the back of legacy systems. Existing solutions were often designed and architected to support offline transactions and manual processes, and the business owners today demand globally scalable infrastructure to support the growth their business cases are expected to deliver.

To help IAM practitioners address these challenges and make their organizations and themselves more successful, this series we will outline the:

• Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM
The explosive growth in expectations for IAM infrastructure, and the business cases they support to gain investment in new security programs.

• "Necessity is the mother of invention": Technical solutions developed in the field
Well proven tricks of the trade, used by IAM guru’s to maximize your solution while addressing the requirements of global organizations.

• No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM
Anything is possible, compelling new solutions organizations are unlocking with accelerated Oracle IAM

Let’s get started … by talking about the changing dynamics driving these discussions.

Big Companies are getting bigger everyday, and increasingly organizations operate across state lines, multiple times zones, and in many countries or continents at the same time. No longer is midnight to 6am a safe time to take down the system for upgrades, to run recon’s and import or update user accounts and attributes. Further IT organizations are operating as shared services with SLA’s similar to telephone carrier levels expected by their “clients”. Workers are moved in and out of roles on a weekly, daily, or even hourly rate and IAM is expected to support those rapid changes. End users registering for services during business hours in Singapore are expected their access to be green-lighted in custom apps hosted in Portugal within the hour. Many of the expectations of asynchronous systems and batched updates are not adequate and the number and types of users is growing.

When organizations acted more like independent teams at functional or geographic levels it was manageable to have processes that relied on a handful of people who knew how to make things work …. Knew how to get you access to the key systems to get your job done. Today everyone is expected to do more with less, the finance administrator previously supporting their local Atlanta sales office might now be asked to help close the books for the Johannesburg team, and access certification process once completed monthly by Joan on the 3rd floor is now done by a shared pool of resources in Sao Paulo.

Fragmented processes that rely on institutional knowledge to get access to systems and get work done quickly break down in these scenarios. Highly robust processes that have automated workflows for connected or disconnected systems give organizations the dynamic flexibility to share work across these lines and cut costs or increase productivity.

As the IT industry computing paradigms continue to change with the passing of time, and as mature or proven approaches become clear, it is normal for organizations to adjust accordingly. Businesses must manage identity in an increasingly hybrid world in which legacy on-premises IAM infrastructures are extended or replaced to support more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users. The old legacy IAM implementation models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply.

End users expect to self-request access to services from their tablet, get supervisor approval over mobile devices and email, and launch the application even if is hosted on the cloud, or run by a partner, vendor, or service provider.

While user expectations are higher, they are also simpler … logging into custom desktop apps to request approvals, or going through email or paper based processes for certification is unacceptable. Users expect security to operate within the paradigm of the application … i.e. feel like the application they are using.

Citizen and customer facing applications have evolved from every where, with custom applications, 3rd party tools, and merging in from acquired entities or 3rd party OEM’s resold to expand your portfolio of services. These all have their own user stores, authentication models, user lifecycles, session management, etc. Often the designers/developers are no longer accessible and the documentation is limited. Bringing together underlying directories to scale for growth, and improve user experience is critical for revenue … but also for operations.

Job functions are more dynamic.... take the Olympics for example. Endless organizations from corporations broadcasting, endorsing, or marketing through the event … to non-profit athletic foundations and public/government entities for athletes and public safety, all operate simultaneously on the world stage. Each organization needs to spin up short-term teams, often dealing with proprietary information from hot ads to racing strategies or security plans. IAM is expected to enable team’s to spin up, enable new applications, protect privacy, and secure critical infrastructure. Then it needs to be disabled just as quickly as users go back to their previous responsibilities.

On a more technical level …
Optimized system directory; tuning guidelines and parameters are needed by businesses today. Business’s need to be making the right choices (virtual directories) and considerations via choosing the correct architectural patterns (virtual, direct, replicated, and tuning), challenge is that business need to assess and chose the correct architectural patters (centralized, virtualized, and distributed)

Today's Business organizations have very complex heterogeneous enterprises that contain diverse and multifaceted information. With today's ever changing global landscape, the strategic end goal in challenging times for business is business agility. The business of identity management requires enterprise's to be more agile and more responsive than ever before. The continued proliferation of networking devices (PC, tablet, PDA's, notebooks, etc.) has caused the number of devices and users to be granted access to these devices to grow exponentially. Business needs to deploy an IAM system that can account for the demands for authentication and authorizations to these devices.

Increased innovation is forcing business and organizations to centralize their identity management services. Access management needs to handle traditional web based access as well as handle new innovations around mobile, as well as address insufficient governance processes which can lead to rouge identity accounts, which can then become a source of vulnerabilities within a business’s identity platform. Risk based decisions are providing challenges to business, for an adaptive risk model to make proper access decisions via standard Web single sign on for internal and external customers,. Organizations have to move beyond simple login and passwords to address trusted relationship questions such as: Is this a trusted customer, client, or citizen? Is this a trusted employee, vendor, or partner? Is this a trusted device?

Without a solid technological foundation, organizational performance, collaboration, constituent services, or any other organizational processes will languish. A Single server location presents not only network concerns for distributed user base, but identity challenges. The network risks are centered on latency of the long trip that the traffic has to take. Other risks are a performance around availability and if the single identity server is lost, all access is lost.

As you can see, there are many reasons why performance tuning IAM will have a substantial impact on the success of your organization. In our next installment in the series we roll up our sleeves and get into detailed tuning techniques used everyday by thought leaders in the field implementing Oracle Identity & Access Management Solutions.

Wednesday Jun 26, 2013

In our last three posts, we’ve examined the revolution that’s occurring today in identity and access management (IAM). We looked at the business driversbehind the growth of cloud-based IAM, the shortcomings of the old, last-century IAM models, and the new opportunities that federation, identity hubs and other new cloud capabilities can provide by changing the way you interact with everyone who does business with you.

In this, our final post in the series, we’ll cover the key things you, the enterprise architect, should keep in mind when considering moving IAM to the cloud.

Invariably, what starts the consideration process is a burning business need: a compliance requirement, security vulnerability or belt-tightening edict. Many on the business side view IAM as the “silver bullet” – and for good reason. You can almost always devise a solution using some aspect of IAM.

The most critical question to ask first when using IAM to address the business need is, simply: is my solution complete? Typically, “business” is not focused on the big picture. Understandably, they’re focused instead on the need at hand: Can we be HIPAA compliant in 6 months? Can we tighten our new hire, employee transfer and termination processes? What can we do to prevent another password breach? Can we reduce our service center costs by the end of next quarter?

The business may not be focused on the complete set of services offered by IAM but rather a single aspect or two. But it is the job – indeed the duty – of the enterprise architect to ensure that all aspects are being met. It’s like remodeling a house but failing to consider the impact on the foundation, the furnace or the zoning or setback requirements. While the homeowners may not be thinking of such things, the architect, of course, must.

At Simeio Solutions, the way we ensure that all aspects are being taken into account – to expose any gaps or weaknesses – is to assess our client’s IAM capabilities against a five-step maturity model ranging from “ad hoc” to “optimized.” The model we use is similar to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s based upon some simple criteria, which can provide a visual representation of how well our clients fair when evaluated against four core categories:

·Program Governance

·Access Management (e.g., Single Sign-On)

·Identity and Access Governance (e.g., Identity Intelligence)

·Enterprise Security (e.g., DLP and SIEM)

Often our clients believe they have a solution with all the bases covered, but the model exposes the gaps or weaknesses. The gaps are ideal opportunities for the cloud to enter into the conversation.

The complete process is straightforward:

1.Look at the big picture, not just the immediate need – what is our roadmap and how does this solution fit?

2.Determine where you stand with respect to the four core areas – what are the gaps?

3.Decide how to cover the gaps – what role can the cloud play?

Returning to our home remodeling analogy, at some point, if gaps or weaknesses are discovered when evaluating the complete impact of the proposed remodel – if the existing foundation wouldn’t support the new addition, for example – the owners need to decide if it’s time to move to a new house instead of trying to remodel the old one.

However, with IAM it’s not an either-or proposition – i.e., either move to the cloud or fix the existing infrastructure. It’s possible to use new cloud technologies just to cover the gaps.

Many of our clients start their migration to the cloud this way, dipping in their toe instead of taking the plunge all at once. Because our cloud services offering is based on the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite, we can offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in this regard. The Oracle platform is not a collection of point solutions, but rather a complete, integrated, best-of-breed suite. Yet it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can choose just the features and capabilities you need using a pay-as-you-go model, incrementally turning on and off services as needed. Better still, all the other capabilities are there, at the ready, whenever you need them.

Spooling up these cloud-only services takes just a fraction of the time it would take a typical organization to deploy internally. SLAs in the cloud may be higher than on premise, too. And by using a suite of software that’s complete and integrated, you can dramatically lower cost and complexity.

If your in-house solution cannot be migrated to the cloud, you might consider using hardware appliances such as Simeio’s Cloud Interceptor to extend your enterprise out into the network. You might also consider using Expert Managed Services. Cost is usually the key factor – not just development costs but also operational sustainment costs. Talent or resourcing issues often come into play when thinking about sustaining a program. Expert Managed Services such as those we offer at Simeio can address those concerns head on.

In a cloud offering, identity and access services lend to the new paradigms described in my previous posts. Most importantly, it allows us all to focus on what we're meant to do – provide value, lower costs and increase security to our respective organizations. It’s that magic “silver bullet” that business knew you had all along.

Tuesday Jun 18, 2013

Super user accounts are, unfortunately, a necessary evil. It’s just a fact of life in the IT industry that someone, somewhere, has to have the ability to make fundamental (and therefore potentially catastrophic!) changes to key systems.

One of my least favourite experiences as a consultant was gaining access to an account though a process that was reminiscent of a spy thriller – the password was typed onto a card, which was cut in two, with each half stored in a separate safe and each key entrusted to a meticulous security officer. Navigating the procedures to get the halves together in time to be useful was a trial of persuasion and scheduling – I can see why Tom Cruise prefers to abseil in through the roof instead of filling in yet another form!

Compliance officers are increasingly scrutinising privileged accounts and the processes that control access to them – not surprisingly, since surveys have shown that up to a quarter of IT professionals have experienced misuse of such accounts, and almost half of all companies fail to manage these accounts in accordance with the law (http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240111956/One-in-four-IT-security-staff-abuse-admin-rights-survey-shows). The results can be spectacular and sobering – the UBS trader Kweku Adoboli cost his company $2.3 billion after making disastrous trades using a privileged account which he was not authorised to use.

Thankfully, there is now a better way. As we’ve seen in this series, with the ESSO suite the technology exists to manage user passwords without the user having to actually ‘know’ that password. It is possible to extend this functionality to include those previously hard to manage privileged accounts by introducing Oracle Privileged Accounts Manager (OPAM). OPAM acts as a secure password vault for privileged accounts, but unlike other password vaults it can be connected directly to the ESSO Logon Manager agent so that passwords can be requested, obtained and used, all from the user’s desktop.

OPAM is particularly useful for companies with large, decentralised UNIX environments. We are currently engaged with a large financial organisation which has several hundred servers, with various distributions of Linux and UNIX that are managed by different teams. With OPAM, all those precious root accounts have for the first time been corralled together in one location, where they can be released as needed to any authorised user. OPAM is equally adept at managing identities stored in directories, including Windows service accounts within Active Directory.

To calm the fears of any compliance officers who may be reading these words nervously, it is possible to implement workflows to control the request process. This may include approvals from a higher authority, complete with email or mobile notifications to the approver. And of course ESSO and OPAM feature end-to-end audit trails – from request, to check out, to each use of the privileged account, through to check in. Tracking who has being doing what with each account has never been easier.

In addition to managing privileged accounts, the ESSO suite also allows users to distribute their personal accounts in a similar manner. Many of us have experienced the frustration of needing access to a system, a record or an email only to discover that the person with access is on holiday or otherwise unavailable. In extreme cases, this may require that the absent user’s Windows account be reset to allow another user to log on and gain access. ESSO’s Account Delegation allows these key users to pro-actively devolve their account credentials to another user for a set period – no passwords required!

Monday Jun 17, 2013

Excitement is building around an upcoming webinar hosted by Oracle Partner, AmerIndia on June 27th. Arun Mehta, Sr Consultant with @AmerIndia, and Sid Mishra from Oracle, will be speaking on the subject of Mobility in the Enterprise and the implications of BYOD has on the security postures of the organization and the steps you can take to reduce your risk.

For a preview on what you can expect to learn from this webinar, check out the editorial posted here on the OracleIDM blog last week by AmerIndia "Embracing Mobility in the Workspace" by Arun Mehta. Arun addresses in this editorial, a segment of what he plans to cover in this Webinar.

Wednesday Jun 12, 2013

In our previous blog, we looked at the business drivers behind the growth of cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM). These drivers, combined with cultural and technology trends, have made cloud-based IAM more attractive – and, frankly, more necessary – than ever.

Now that business has evolved to offer more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users, the old models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. Our old identity management and security models designed for internal users simply can’t keep up with the rapidly evolving landscape. The forces that are shaping this new reality are so powerful, their momentum so great, that they now dictate the terms of how identity must be managed within an organization. The balance of power has shifted away from the IT organization and into the hands of end-users. If you are to meet their expectations, if you hope to compete and remain relevant, you must make the transition from build-your-own IAM to out-of-the-box IAM, from customization to configuration.

While there may be a big stick pushing us to make this transition, the carrots are equally compelling: lower costs, faster time to market, enhanced security, greater flexibility and, perhaps most important, the freedom to focus on the value and quality of the services you provide instead of how they’re provided.

There may be no better example of this than bring-your-own-device (BYOD). For years, IT laid down the law to prevent it. Now, fueled by the consumerization of mobile devices and tablets, BYOD has become the rule rather than the exception. It was inevitable. BYOD not only reduces strain on the organization to purchase and support such devices, it also increases employee satisfaction and productivity.

But, of course, the concerns behind the original reticence to allow BYOD remain. In fact, those concerns are magnified now that we’ve moved from uniform desktops tethered to the office to diverse mobile devices that can literally be taken – and lost – anywhere in the world.

Here’s where out-of-the-box solutions such as Oracle Access Management Suite come to the rescue. They’re designed to enable centralized policy management for securing access to services via mobile applications, going beyond web single sign-on, authentication and authorization. Such solutions are designed from the ground up to handle the added complexity of password management and security in a mobile world, including strong authentication, real-time behavioral profiling, and device fingerprinting. Adaptive products such as those from Oracle provide a multi-faceted approach to mitigate breaches into mobile and Web Applications, all while tying into a closed loop audit process with powerful reporting and notification engines.

Another example is the growing need to manage external identities – those of partners or customers. It may be tempting to use existing capabilities designed for internal identities for this. After all, the same basic services are involved, including handling access requests, granting access, and password management. But the differences are simply too great. There are different business needs, different security concerns, different compliance requirements, even different licensing issues.

Here, too, the new cloud-based IAM models offer us a solution. Their multi-tenancy capabilities mean a single instance of software can serve multiple constituencies discretely by virtually partitioning the management of identities based on any criteria or business need.

As they say on those late night infomercials, that’s not all. The cloud model and its converging standards open the door to entirely new ways of dealing with external identities. For example, products such as Oracle Access Manager allow users to register for a site's services using their social login IDs as an authentication mechanism (using OAuth and OpenID standards). This gets the organization out of the business of managing these external identities altogether, delegating password management, user profile, account settings, etc. to a third party – Google or Facebook, for example.

If you’re not willing to delegate these tasks, you can still leverage external identities during registration by pulling the user’s basic identity information from a trusted third-party identity provider (IDP). This approach marries the old with the new, maintaining a security perimeter for user access by ensuring audit and closed-loop certification processes are still in place, while reducing the burden on the user who no longer has to provide basic information in order to register.

Delegation is a recurring theme in new IAM models. Cloud-based IAM, for example, makes it easy to push out user administration, certification and operational request management to individual lines of business. This in turn enables you to downsize centralized call support by using delegated authorities within those business units – managers who are closer (both conceptually and physically) to the users who require access. This is done via strong workflow management, which ties into a well-governed and managed role service as well as enterprise roles and processes for mover/joiner/leaver scenarios.

Case in point: the HR systems the US government uses to provision all roles (for resources and entitlements). Users request access directly from their managers. End-dates are used to enforce de-provisioning of all granted access, even during termination. The result is end-to-end lifecycle management with delegated administration, while ensuring compliance with a centralized audit process.

In our next post, we’ll explore what identity looks like in a secure, connected world and what that means for your business.

Tuesday Jun 11, 2013

Traditionally when a user is on-boarded into an organisation they are given a desktop password along with a whole host of other passwords to access the required business applications to enable them to do their job. Inevitably there will be numerous associated company information security policies that dictate that passwords should not be written down or shared with colleagues etc.

Trying to remember numerous passwords can be onerous on the end user at the best of times and can lead to a plethora of password sins committed by the end user. Whilst we can deploy some SSO technologies to relieve password fatigue, the on-boarding provisioning process often means that the user needs to know their passwords at some point – or do they?

I recently worked on a project at a leading engineering company who were in the process of deploying a large new ERP system. The end users were highly skilled engineers focusing on cutting edge technology but password security was not high on their list of priorities. Traditionally within the organisation, credentials for new applications were sent by email and sometimes they were communicated over the phone. Inevitably these were written down in text files and diaries or passwords were changed to be the same “pet’s name” type password for multiple applications.

This was a huge concern for the Chief Architect who wanted to remove end user password management and provide “zero touch” credential provisioning for the new ERP applications. He also wanted to satisfy auditing and compliance requirements by enforcing complex passwords whilst preventing unauthorised credential sharing. All this needed to be achieved without inconveniencing the users.

We discussed the tried and tested approach of using of a full blown identity management solution. However, his response to this was that although wider identity management was on their long term roadmap, he had a hard deadline to deliver the ERP system within three months and with limited resources. With traditional user provisioning ‘out the window’ we had to come up with another approach. Everyone would be using the new ERP system for their timesheets on the same day, and with any business impact due to unavailability therefore being potentially very significant, the customer couldn’t afford to have issues related to logging in.

One product that they already had licensed was the Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on (ESSO) suite. Oracle ESSO is a well- known established product which provides single sign to any application at the desktop. Not so well known are the additional tools provided within the suite. One of these additional tools is Oracle ESSO Provisioning Gateway. Provisioning Gateway is a web based application that complements the other tools in the suite by enabling the provisioning of application credentials directly to the SSO agent without user interaction.

The Provisioning Gateway server exposes a web service interface that allows it to receive instructions submitted by any other provisioning server. Although Provisioning Gateway is more commonly deployed connected to an identity management system it does have command line interface (CLI) utilities supplied with the software. These utilities allow for scripted interactions with the Provision Gateway server including batch operations.

For this customer it was possible to export the user credential data out of the ERP system into a text-file format. Then, armed only with the tools provided within the Oracle ESSO suite it was possible to script the provisioning of these user credentials in batches of 500-1000 to the Provisioning Gateway server. The server provisioned the credentials to the ESSO repository and the credentials were synchronised to the desktop SSO agent at user logon.

So far, so good. At this stage, the users were still unaware that anything had happened. The new ERP system wasn’t live yet, but in anticipation of its general release we now had each individual’s username and password ready to go in their SSO credential store – ready for first login.

For security reasons, the ERP system was configured to require a password change at first logon. Therefore, when the user launched the application for the first time on its launch date an application change password event was triggered. The Oracle ESSO agent was configured to recognise and respond to this change password event, automatically generating and inserting a new password leaving the user logged on with a new complex password. The end user did not know their password at any point of the on-boarding process or for subsequent logons. Therefore the opportunity of sharing their logon details with colleagues was eliminated. Furthermore, issues with the distribution of new passwords was avoided altogether.

The aurionPro SENA fast rollout template for Oracle ESSO enabled this customer to hit the implementation deadline of the ERP project and also address the security requirements of the organisation. ESSO Provisioning Gateway also has a management interface and this customer exploited this feature to allow the helpdesk team to apply the zero touch methodology to other applications.

As we discussed in the first blog (Putting the EASY into SSO) - Oracle ESSO provides more than just single sign-on to desktop applications. Its use for zero-touch provisioning shows its versatility and that it can form a core part of an integrated identity and access management framework. It’s not just a tactical tool for a single issue. Stay tuned for next week’s blog in this series where we’ll be investigating the capabilities of Oracle ESSO still further.

Monday Jun 10, 2013

“In 2013, mobile devices will pass PCs to be most common Web access tools. By 2015, over 80% of handsets in mature markets will be smart phones.”

-Gartner Research

Across the globe, corporations are embracing the influx of mobility and the last five years have seen an expanding role of mobility in the workspace. Enterprises everywhere are coming up with innovative initiatives to support the mobility needs of personnel working for them. In addition, a variety of mobile applications and services are being offered to the workforce to make them more effective and efficient at work. Such applications and services unify different user populations within the organization, including internal workforce, partners, customers, and consumers, with the internal and external resources of the organization.

There are numerous reasons why enterprises are embracing mobility in the workspace and the chart below highlights the most important ones:

The devices used by the user populations are usually diverse in nature and leads to a fragmented and a disconnected landscape. As a result, IT architects and product managers of organizations are compelled to develop applications that can be ported to mobile devices of users. However, the deployed in-house applications aren’t capable of averting increasingly sophisticated identity thefts and data breaches of today. Development and utilization of secured mobile applications is often the primary concern that bothers infrastructure & solution architects today.

Forrester Consulting commissioned a study on behalf of Cisco Systems in 2012 to gather information on top security concerns and compatibility issues that concern senior-level decision-makers. The chart below illustrates the results.

There are a lot of aspects that should be managed to effectively support mobile devices. They are:

· Password and User management – Management of multiple passwords and user identities for each application

· Device Management – Management of authentication and authorization of devices allowing users to access company resources securely. A high mobile device turnover by user population calls for re-registration of new devices and blacklisting/wiping-out of corporate information from older devices. Device management automates such processes in a structured manner

· Application Access Management – Management of role-based access that is usually absent or is being managed locally in the application leading to unauthorized access to applications. And the local role management leads to redundant and expensive management of access to applications via roles

· API Management – Management of central publishing, promoting, and monitoring of exposed APIs within a secure and scalable environment that is often missing. Many applications todays exposes web services which may not consumed by mobile devices as efficiently as possible.

Following section describes how the above-mentioned aspects are managed and how challenges and issues related to adoption of mobile devices are addressed by using Oracle API Gateway and a variety of other components of Oracle Access management stack.

· User Management – The mentioned aspects and challenges are addressed by having a User Provisioning tool like Oracle Identity Manager (OIM). OIM streamlines user provisioning and de-provisioning, and other identity based lifecycle events in the organization. Along with that, users are also provisioned access to various target systems. Once the step of access provisioning is completed, Oracle Access Management (OAM) steps in for users who wish to access the target system by using single sign-on. The authentication can be done by binding to LDAP, but OAM brings additional advantages as it allows various policies and procedures to be defined and implemented for the users accessing target systems within the enterprise. Furthermore, access request to all resources on mobile devices are intercepted by Oracle API Gateway or OAG (deployed in DMZ) in order to enforce the policies that define the steps involved. OAG gathers the necessary user, application, device, and network context data to enable authentication decisions and validates the gathered data using the Access Management tool as per the policies laid down.

However, this approach only performs user authentication and relies on Access Management tool to perform coarse grain authorization, and may not be sufficient for the detailed authorization rules defined within the application itself.

Please refer to the figure below for a better understanding.

· Device Management – Mobile devices used by users are registered through Identity Manager as an asset and this information is provisioned to an LDAP, DB device, or an App registry. Also, Oracle API Gateway is used to perform device authentication by using the custom authentication logic it comes with. Once the device is authenticated, a device token is generated, and the same is used by mobile devices in subsequent interactions in order to fetch the desired information from the applications. This is a simple approach and can be employed to achieve the desired results in small work environments where functionalities like device profiling, blacklisting and whitelisting, knowledge based authentication, and device control is of less importance.

For work environments that are larger and more complex, and where the previously mentioned functionalities are important, Access Management component can be extended to include and deploy Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) along with Mobile and Social Services components. By doing this, the desired Device Management functionality is implemented.

In other scenarios, device registration can also be delegated to OAAM components rather than registering it through Oracle Identity Manager against the user record. Here, mobile and social services components play a crucial role of mediating security tokens for mobile devices to access enterprise resources and cloud based applications.

Please refer to the figure below for a better understanding.

· Application Access Management – The above two architectures explain how Oracle API Gateway (OAG) manages and performs user and device authentication. Oracle API gateway is Policy enforcement point for mobile devices in a similar way Web-Gates are policy enforcement for Oracle Access Management. However, the fine-grained authorization can’t be overlooked.

Classical approach of programming included embedding the authorization logic within the application itself, making the management and extension of application security cumbersome. And it can lead to failed audit and compliance objective requirements of certifying who has what access and at what level. This may not be acceptable in today’s world of increased scrutiny of applications and their access.

Fortunately, Oracle Entitlement Server (OES) comes to rescue and serves as a central policy decision/definition point where all applications can externalize authorization rules. When used with OAG, the authorization policies set by OES are enforced. In addition, the combo can also redact the data elements based on various roles of users accessing applications through mobile devices.

The figure below will be able to help you understand the concepts better.

· API Management – Enterprises today have applications that expose web services primarily meant for either intranet use or exchanging information with business-partner applications. That paradigm has taken a major shift with the proliferation in on-boarding of mobile devices and the need to access the respective applications on these devices. Mobile devices may not be able to consume the exposed web-services as efficiently and thus, require enterprises to adopt strategies to either re-write or extend those web-services for such use-cases, or rely on Oracle API Gateway (OAG) features and functionalities.

OAG provides functionalities that shield these efforts and perform content transformation on the fly in order to make it adaptable for mobile device use. Oracle API Gateway provides controlled connection between APIs and applications that exposes them. OAG also allows access related metrics for any APIs managed by it. In a well laid-out architecture and implementation of OAG, enterprises can expose these services confidently with additional benefits such as Threat protection and XML Acceleration while having the same performance levels, and exceptional reporting and analytics capabilities across all services.

In all, mobile devices have evolved to better suit the needs of consumers but at the same time have traded of their security to ensure usability. These trade-offs increasingly contribute to security risks when such devices connect to the enterprise resources.

For more information on registration on our upcoming joint webinar with guest presenters Arun Mehta from AmerIndia, and Sid Mishra from Oracle Corporation, please go to http://www.amerindia.net/webinars.php. Here you will be able to pre-register for this event, where we will discuss the changing face of mobile devices in today’s work environment and the risks associated with this upcoming trend. In addition, solutions available to address such risks will be described, while also highlighting solutions specific to different types of organization.

Author

Arun Mehta

Mobile Security Practice Leader

AmerIndia Technologies Inc.

Arun Mehta is Principal Solution Architect in Mobile Security, Security Solutions practice at AmerIndia Technologies Inc. In this role, Arun leads a team of specialist technical consultants and architects across North America focusing on Oracle's Security and Identity Management technology. Arun has been in the field of Security for over a decade and has experience across large and complex Identity Management projects in the North America region covering multiple industry verticals. More recently, he has been engaged on a number of projects including enterprise security platforms and mobile access management to help customers enable digital and business transformation initiatives.

Our expertise and client base spans all major verticals. Customers include Fortune 5000 companies in the financial, technology, healthcare, insurance, education and manufacturing sectors. Because of our wide range of experience and subject matter knowledge, major consulting firms also rely on AmerIndia as a trusted partner.

Wednesday Jun 05, 2013

One of the most significant advancements in IT in the last few years has been the shift to cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM). While the word “revolution” is all-too-often used in IT, arguably it’s the right word to describe the transformation that the cloud brings to identity.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll delve into the details of this revolution, including a look at its impact on how you’ll do business, why change is needed, and what you’ll need to know to make the transition. Let’s get started by looking at the business drivers.

In just a few short years, cloud-based IAM has matured from simple portals offering single sign-on for a handful of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to sophisticated, comprehensive solutions that integrate seamlessly with virtually any directory service and application – on-premise, legacy or SaaS. They provide automated workflows for user access request submission and review, provisioning and attestation. They enable federation. And they simplify compliance with regulatory mandates.

The cloud model itself comes in a variety of flavors that provide enough flexibility to meet almost any organization’s needs, from public clouds that dramatically lower TCO through multi-tenancy to private clouds that can meet even the most stringent security and control requirements.

The drivers behind this revolution will be familiar to any CXO.

First, CXOs are facing increased pressure to reduce cost and complexity. They’re expected to follow the popular business school advice to “stick to the knitting”: focus exclusively on the core business and jettison everything else. IAM is squarely in the cross hairs, a tempting target for organizations looking to outsource services that don’t offer a clear and direct competitive advantage.

At the same time, IT is now expected to be a business enabler – to help grow the business, not just support it. This requires IT to be more flexible and nimble to meet ever-changing business demands, including the ability to quickly and easily provide employees, partners and customers with secure and role-appropriate access to a rapidly growing and evolving set of information, applications and other online resources.

User expectations, too, are rising rapidly. As users become accustomed to using more and more services online from filing their taxes to sharing their photos, they now expect the convenience of moving seamlessly between multiple services using a single set of credentials – their Facebook or Google accounts, for example.

Add to the mix the growing security, compliance and regulatory mandates tied to identity, and the challenge can seem insurmountable.

Thankfully, the cloud has offered us a clear path forward. The benefits are just as clear.

First, the cloud delivers on the promise of outsourcing: reducing capital strain and freeing the business to focus on its core competencies. It eliminates the large investment required to stand up an IAM infrastructure: the hardware costs, in many cases the software licenses, and all the configurations and integrations in between. It eliminates ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs, too.

Many cloud-based IAM solutions offer on-demand services with pay-as-you-go pricing – you get and pay for the capability when and only when you need it. They also significantly reduce operational costs so that companies have the benefit of automated IAM without the costs of implementing and maintaining an in-house IAM infrastructure.

In addition to the rise of secure and reliable ISO 27001 compliant data centers and complete, enterprise-ready solutions such as Oracle Cloud Computing, standards-based protocols have dramatically reduced the risk of making the leap to cloud-based IAM. As the saying goes, “the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” While many of the first cloud-based IAM solutions seemed to add more to the list, today we’re seeing a real convergence toward a small set of widely adopted standards that have made implementation and integration remarkably easy, including REST-based APIs, OAuth, SAML and OpenID Connect.

While some dive in headlong, many dip their toe in the water with quick-win implementations – to address rising costs for password management by offering self-service, for example – and then progress through provisioning into a handful of core identity systems, synchronization of passwords between authoritative system, etc. This approach often allows the organization time to see that identity can be leveraged as a service for other business needs.

A large financial institution, for example, mandated that all its lines of business use a centralized in-house identity governance solution, then charged each LOB to use the service. This could be done only with a service approach to identity, which became possible once the beachhead of self-service password management had been established.

In our next post, we’ll explore the reasons why organizations must make the transition to new, cloud-based IAM models if they hope to compete in a world where business has moved online. For more information on the services and offerings at Simeio Solutions, you can learn more by going to www.simeiosolutions.com

Tuesday Jun 04, 2013

Enterprise Single Sign-On occupies an unusual position in the field of IAM. In automating the sign-on of users to their applications, it is somewhat uniquely, a client-side application. For some of our customers, the role of enterprise SSO in an IAM programme isn’t entirely clear. I’ve spoken with many security architects who view its use as somehow tantamount to cheating. Surely, they assert, if we fully integrate systems at the back-end then the need for a client component doing sign-on becomes unnecessary. Architecturally this may be true. But the realities are that users have issues with passwords right now. Enterprise single sign-on addresses problems immediately. However, it’s also much more than just a tool that signs the user on to anything from their desktop. It is a tool that can be used to solve related business problems and technical challenges just as well as it can deliver users from their credential nightmares.

In this series of four articles, we will explore how enterprise SSO can be used to deliver these additional benefits. We will cover zero touch credential provisioning, making enterprise single sign-on an integrated part of an IAM programme and the management of delegated accounts. First, however, we’ll start with an easy one… making everyone happy all at the same time!

Capturing business requirements for identity and access management projects can be an art. There are so many interested parties – technical, legal, HR, end-users, application owners to name but a few – that it’s rare to reach a speedy consensus. I was in one such meeting with a customer a while back who were trying to explore what the success criteria would be for their enterprise single sign-on initiative. Relatively straightforward, you’d think, but after five hours the customer was still going round in circles! It wasn’t until the project sponsor finally arrived at the meeting and spoke about his vision that sanity was restored. His single request? His single measure? “Make it easy for my users!” That’s all he wanted. If other benefits accrued, that was a bonus.

Oracle’s Enterprise Single Sign-non Suite Plus (Oracle ESSO) is designed to do precisely what the project sponsor wanted. It includes a number of technologies designed to relieve the pain of passwords, by reducing the number of forgotten or incorrect credentials that a user has, whilst simultaneously making it easier to provide those same credentials to users without compromising security. What’s more, these benefits can be obtained surprisingly quickly – Oracle ESSO has a very light footprint and a flexible framework approach to managing credentials for almost any application. Web, Windows, Cloud or mainframe, passwords can quickly be eliminated as a source of pain for users and IT staff alike.

Oracle ESSO takes the management of credentials away from users. It stores passwords in a secure manner so that the user cannot forget it. It manages the password lifecycle, securely updating credentials when they expire. And it streamlines the user experience – application logon is handled automatically, so the user can get to work immediately without having to fumble over the username and password.

Of course, Oracle ESSO also allows the organisation to achieve lots of other benefits if it’s implemented correctly – reduced number of calls to helpdesk, increased productivity through faster password resets and so on. But fundamentally, as a user-facing tool it has to be one that’ll gain rapid acceptance for its deployment to be heralded as a success. The additional benefits won’t appear if the users don’t adopt the new tools they’re given.

aurionPro SENA has considerable experience with the Oracle ESSO suite. In fact, we’ve got the deployment of Oracle ESSO down to a fine art. Referring back to our original customer above – speed of deployment was important. “Proof of concept in days, pilot in weeks, deployment in two months” was the mantra. All with no significant operational impact on either end-users or IT personnel. We helped the customer achieve these goals. Deploying Oracle ESSO requires a delicate balance of technical knowledge, light-touch project management and extremely well-managed engagement with the end-user community. The last element is the most important. Involving key users as early as possible when their applications are being ‘profiled’ for single sign-on helps to ensure that they buy in to the end goal. They understand how Oracle ESSO will enhance the way that they work and are keen to share this with other users. If done right, a cascade of anticipation can ripple through the user community so that, rather than fearing change as can often happen with IT projects, the users are willing the change to arrive sooner! The use of appropriate briefing tools, promotion of the new system and similar techniques can further enhance the effectiveness of the final Oracle ESSO rollout.

So, Oracle ESSO makes it easy for end-users. That’s great, that’s exactly what our customer wanted, and it’s what any user-facing application should strive to do. Deploying Oracle ESSO, when managed properly, is one of those very unusual IT projects, though. Not only does it make things easier for end-users, it also makes things easier for IT support teams, helpdesk operators, auditors and a whole range of teams within the organisation. So it’s win-win all round.

But this is just the starting point. Oracle ESSO acts as a great launch pad for customers looking to further streamline credential management, giving users a better experience whilst also improving security and providing previously unavailable audit data. Stay tuned as we demonstrate how you can unlock the potential of Oracle ESSO.

Tuesday May 28, 2013

Qualcomm discusses the benefits of closed loop compliance remediation and other key features of Oracle’s latest Identity Management release, that enable them to meet business objectives, manage user access attestations, and enforce compliance.

Join us in watching this short video to understand how Oracle is enabling Qualcomm to meet and exceed their compliance goals with Oracle Identity Management. Click HERE to watch the video